


Pass, repass, glide away

by lotesse



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Community: kink_bingo, Crossdressing, M/M, Pre-Canon, Queer Themes, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-23
Updated: 2010-09-23
Packaged: 2017-10-12 03:39:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,457
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/120353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a very good disguise, but having once observed it Mycroft could not fail to see with strangely doubled vision: at once the familiar stripling boy-body he'd watched from childhood and the enchanting odd lovely girl-form that Sherlock was wearing like a second skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pass, repass, glide away

_The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different, whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity._ ~Hume

When Mycroft Holmes was a young man at University, some twenty-two years of age, his brother Sherlock was a boy of fifteen: bright and inquisitive and utterly impossible. The lad crawled, climbed, and ran across the entire of West Sussex, wild as a young falcon. Their father did not even try to contain him; he had done so with limited success when they were both boys, but Sherlock's persistence had worn the old man down. His second son had been the child of his age, born long after he had looked for any additional progeny to his heir; it had perhaps been unfortunate that the son of that age had been born the most energetic, perceptive, inquisitive child that Mycroft had ever seen.

Sherlock's mind was like a machine, or like burning magnesium. It consumed all impediments, blinding and bright, grinding information down to a fine grist of theory, narrative, and science. And the flame of the boy's mind was not quenched when it had burned through its fuel; instead it turned back on itself, becoming increasingly nervous, hyperactive, and self-defeating.

He had been a strange child, and showed fair to grow into a strange young man: oddly solemn for his years, pale-faced and quiet, introspective to a fault, unexpectedly sensitive, unexpectedly callous.

Mycroft frequently found his little brother exhausting in the extreme, but his deep and ineradicable sympathy for the boy helped him to patience. It was scarcely Sherlock's fault that he had been made a tightly-strung instrument and then had been put into the hands of a tired and rather bored paternal musician. He was not a happy child, and as Mycroft often reflected when he found himself dealing with the boy, Sherlock's mind was as much a curse to himself as it was to everyone around him. However, the aforementioned sympathy did him little good when he found himself home on holiday, having to endure both his father's sullen temper and his little brother's flaring, fitful temperament.

That morning, Sherlock had been discovered experimenting with vitriolic acid clandestinely under his bed. In the ensuing gunpowder quarrel between himself and their father he had thrown out several very pert remarks concerning things that he ought not to have known about their mother - the mother that he had never known save in babyhood. The boy was too French for his own good, Mycroft reflected ruefully. Their father had gone white to the lips, visibly struck by Sherlock's verbal arrow, which had by Mycroft's estimation discomfited him extremely. She had been no more a proper wife than Sherlock was a son; in his almost uncanny ability to nettle their father, Sherlock was very much her child.

No person not of their family ever would have seen the lines of strain and harshly enforced control around their father's lips and eyes, but Mycroft noted them, and would not have been surprised if Sherlock had not also seen the marks of his victory on his father's face. Sherlock saw absolutely everything, and most particularly he saw the things his parent most wished him to remain blind to.

Perhaps it was the force of this blow, or the renewed pain that the memory of her always awakened in him, that caused Holmes _pere_ to run cold. Instead of boxing his youngest son's ears, or even tanning his hide with a willow switch, he grew still as a stone, and then after a dreadful long frozen moment he turned silently on his long legs and stalked out of the room. The boy remained red-faced and short-breathed behind him, caught in the ice of his father's cool rage. When their father strode past the housekeeper in the hall, he'd pitched his voice to be heard: "Send the young master to his rooms, and keep him there until further notice. I do not wish to see his face until I send for him - which I am quite unlikely to do any time in the near future."

Sherlock's face was set and pale, and he looked rather more shocked than Mycroft had seen him for quite some time. Had he not known, then, what it was that he'd said?

Mycroft had watched his little brother being led off unresisting with sympathy but without surprise; Sherlock's words had effected him more than he might have expected, and he was not entirely sorry to have the boy out of his sight for a while. Mycroft missed their mother fiercely; yet he could not in truthfulness admit his little brother to have been wrong. But Sherlock's astute perception was painful nonetheless, ripping apart the scar tissue that had formed over one of the worst of the Holmes family wounds. She had been unconventional, she had been foreign, she had been eccentric and exciting and beautiful in a strange way that belonged only to her - and now she was dead and buried, and the three of them were left alone. Sherlock himself had scarcely known her, having been but a child, still in short dresses, at the time of her death - and so perhaps the wound for him was different, a bloodless scar at which he could somehow jest.

Their father had gone black-clouded into his study, and Mycroft did not dare follow him. The man tended to grow cruel and cutting in anger, and Mycroft saw very little reason to expose himself to that scathing rage. Instead he slipped down the hall towards his little brother's room, moving quickly and quietly despite the fact that he was an exceptionally tall young man, and not particularly slender either. Sherlock, just come into his own height, was thin as a willow wand, his large dark eyes and fine-boned face lending him occasionally an inhuman look.

The boy had clearly oiled his hinges and lock recently; good lad. The copy of his little brother's key that Mycroft had taken the precaution of having made some months ago opened the lock without a sound, and he stepped inside the room to deal with the exasperating child in his own way.

But Sherlock was not there; the window was open, and the scuffed traces of his habitual shoes indicated that he'd climbed through it to shimmy down the gutter pipe. Where he'd gone then, it was impossible to tell from his vantage point. He'd have to go out onto the grounds if he was to read the signs that Sherlock would have left behind. And he would have to do it; if their father found that his younger son had gone runaway, he feared that the entire affair would end very, very badly. He did not want to think about it. It had to be prevented of all things.

The staff of the house had changed somewhat since he'd gone away to University, but some of the structures of influence and loyalty he'd erected as a boy remained. A few words in the proper ears and their absence would be covered over for at least the rest of that day, if not longer - their father did not like the labor of childrearing, even less so when it involved Sherlock, who saw around his every disciplinary method and perverted his every parental end, and he would avoid the necessary encounter with the boy for as long as humanly possible. Obstacles thrown in his way, business to conduct, would offer him the excuses he so badly desired, which complicity might allow a ruse to operate for far longer than it would in a better-arranged house.

Mycroft took his coat, his overcoat, and a warm woolen muffler; it was spring, but only just, and still damp enough that once the sun went down it would be chill. He did not dare hope that they would be home ere nightfall, for he knew his brother's agile wit, not to mention his energetic youthful body, too well to hope for a brief chase. He wore his old shoes. He was going to being by tramping over the grounds, and might not ever gain better terrain. Who knew where Sherlock was likely to go, having bolted? His mind was all quicksilver and lightning, impossible to predict or pin down. Beneath Sherlock's window, footprints indented the damp earth, leading off through the orchard and then into the loose gravel of the path. Sherlock had gone, not to the wood, but to the town. Mycroft was not at all sure that it was a positive indicator.

Sherlock was unlikely to have gone out in his own skin; the boy had a particular delight in disguise and in the vagaries of costume. In another life, Mycroft thought, he might have made a splendid tailor or fashioniste. But instead the boy tended to turn his attention to outlandish guises, assuming deeply inappropriate accents and bodily postures along with his strange clothes and facepaints. So as he made the not-inconsiderable trek into town he kept his eyes sharp, knowing that he would have to perceive the irreducible truths of his brother's being through the layers of the boy's not inconsiderable skills at artifice. He could not afford to overlook even the most unlikely figure, for inevitably that one would be the one he sought. The afternoon was wearing on, and the pale light was losing its golden tinge.

Chichester was a centre of light; it was a city of cesspools. It was a a large enough market town that it would have little difficulty concealing a clever runaway boy; it was, Mycroft hoped, a small enough one that it might take such a boy more than a few hours to find any serious trouble.

Alongside the old Roman wall around the town, various knots and currents of humanity tangled, halted, and rushed on. A tramp held out his hat for stray coins. A tall figure stood on the street corner declaiming a sermon in an impassioned and unsteady tone. A girl was loitering outside a little millinery shop, chatting animatedly to a matron, seemingly about the colored laces that adorned her neck. Mycroft did not see his little brother anywhere, and with a heavy sigh he resigned himself to a long afternoon, quite possibly an evening, of sifting his errant sibling out of the larger world.

His attention dragged, surprisingly inexorably, back to the girl with the laces. She was a strange girl, he noted: tall above the average, long and coltish where so many young girls were small and round and compactly delicate. She was, in point of fact, one of the most dazzling specimens of young womanhood he had ever seen. Perhaps it was the energy that snapped and danced in her angular little face, or the elegant grace of the long fingers which toyed unselfconsiously with her dove-grey poplin overskirt. Her hair was of a pretty soft curling dark sort, pulled back to reveal her ears.

Mycroft Holmes did not usually waste his time with empty appreciations of the female forms around him, choosing rather to move in abstracted and thoughtful modes. He saw little point in such casual appraisals, which after all yielded very little information of any import. A girl's character, her discourse and the readiness of her mind, were all of much greater matter than the shape of her face. And yet he could not look away from this young woman's vivid, laughing mouth, or stop himself from perceiving with excruciating clarity the pretty way the cuffs of her sleeves fell around the delicate bones of her wrists.

He moved closer, not sure what he intended but drawn to her. It took him almost embarrassingly long to see it, but at last his perspective shifted and clicked into place, allowing him to look through to the truth of things. Her fingers were long and dexterous and stained with chemicals. She was tall as a boy. And her eyes were those he'd seen every day of his childhood, looking out from his mother's face.

Sherlock.

It was a very good disguise, but having once observed it Mycroft could not fail to see with strangely doubled vision: at once the familiar stripling boy-body he'd watched from childhood and the enchanting odd lovely girl-form that Sherlock was wearing like a second skin. His heart turned over in his chest with a dull, thumping feeling. The likeness was unnerving. Sherlock had not merely copied dress and hair, but expression and manner and posture. He was an uncanny mimic; had it not been for that peculiar sense of magnetism, Mycroft would not have lost a second glance. The coltishness that was gauche in a young boy had softened into something ageless and appealing in the girl.

The boy had to be mad. It was terribly unsafe; it was downright perverse. If anyone saw – if he was found out - Dr. Alfred Taylor's celebrated pamphlet on the Eliza Edwards case had retained enough of its reputation over the years to be yet included in medical and legal curricula, and Mycroft had had to read the odious document cover to cover several times over in the course of his University career. It was not the only case of its kind, but the details had struck his mind most vividly on the occasion of his having first learned them: the dead unclaimed body of the girl, the violation implicit in the exposure of that sad corpse's masculine genitals and the subsequent horrors of the examination for traces of indecent acts. And now his little brother – his dear, sweet, strange, haunting little brother – was parading about the high street in a corset and gown, with his lips stained a blushing pink and high-heeled boots on his narrow feet, talking blithely about ribbons beside a shopfront. It was enough to stop his heart from beating altogether.

Moved by a rare paroxysm of panic, Mycroft went quickly to his errant sibling's side, laying a heavy hand on Sherlock's daintily-clad arm. The boy started mightily, dark eyes widening – good, he'd not lost all sense – and whirled on a high-heeled foot to face his brother. Mycroft observed that while some of the high color fled Sherlock's face, he did not pale as much as he could have done. He was clearly taken by surprise, but evidently regarded himself as safe in fraternal company.

"Hello, brother mine," the boy said softly. The milliner quietly excused herself, leaving the brothers Holmes alone with one another on the street.

Anger rose in Mycroft's throat, followed by confusion, but he swallowed both emotions down again. Sherlock was high-spirited enough to fight him in public, or to run from him, or to engage in any number of unwise and unsafe actions if pushed too hard. After all, he'd left home after a scolding from their father and promptly taken up women's clothing. Hoping to coax him out of the public street before the occurrence of either a quarrel or a break, Mycroft clasped Sherlock's fineboned wrist more closely, and replied in an equally dulcet voice, "Come away now, _petit_ " - here he had to catch himself, the gendered endearment he was so accustomed to having very nearly slipped them into scandal - "come away and talk to me. It isn't safe here; a private room in the inn will do us much better."

Sherlock fixed him with a piercing glance through eyes that looked even larger, darker and more depthless than usual – were those subtle smudges of kohl edging his eyes? - and then, thankfully, followed the guiding pull of Mycroft's hand on his arm, at least temporarily docile.

He could not help but notice, as they passed together arm in arm down the street, the change in Sherlock's gait and posture. He presumed it to be effected by the footwear and - though he very nearly blushed to think of it, which was rare for him – the feminine undergarments that were clearly engaged in sculpting and narrowing Sherlock's slender waist.

_Sherlock's wrist felt delicate as bone china between his fingers, and he did not resist or try to pull away. Instead, an acquiescent look slipped out between his girlishly long lashes, causing Mycroft a short sharp breath and a stumble. He needed to get Sherlock out of the street, he needed – he needed, suddenly, wildly, to touch Sherlock's painted lips, span his narrowed waist, clasp him close and hear the rustle of Sherlock's skirts as he was taken possession of._

Having bundled his sibling through the pub and into a private parlor, trying to ignore the favoring looks Sherlock received in the process from several of the more masculine publicans, Mycroft at last found himself able to breathe with more freedom; at least he no long had to worry about the boy giving himself away. The only concern left to him was to sort out the meaning of all of it, and to try to decide what to do, and to somehow resolve the matter without their father ever so much as knowing they'd been away.

_The private room that he gruffly demanded on entrance to the inn featured a broad, clean-covered bed – indeed, Mycroft wished for his own sanity that it were featured less centrally. He could not avoid notice of it, and Sherlock could not avoid notice of that fact. As his control slipped him by, he thought briefly that he might be the one to fling his younger sibling down onto it, but she anticipated him, and slid down languidly to recline on its surface, propping herself up on one indolent arm. He followed him down, pausing only to unpin his hair and shake it loose, letting it tumble down over his shoulders._

Giving the lad a brief but fervent shake, he said heavily, "For heaven's sake, Sherlock, have you completely taken leave of your senses?"

Sherlock broke away from him, sulkily cradling his abused arm at the other end of the hired parlor. "I do not see why you'd bother asking, brother mine," he said – and though he was not modulating his tone in any artificial way, nevertheless his voice exited that feminized form with an oddly appropriate grace.

Sighing, Mycroft said, "I do not mean to be in any way insensitive, Sherlock, but I do have several rather grave concerns about this venture. I must request that you open your mind to me in this, _petit frere_. I cannot help you if I do not understand."

_Sherlock's mouth beneath his was sweet with scented paint, and he made a small sound of contented pleasure as he parted his lips against Mycroft's. "Yes," the boy breathed, hands tensing and releasing in the bedclothes like catclaws as he pressed against Mycroft's more solid boy wantonly. It was at once completely like and completely unlike the other kisses Mycroft had enjoyed before: the sight and the smell and the texture of Sherlock's rouged mouth were familiar, but the boyish timbre of his ragged breathing was not. The rustle of skirts and the feeling of corsetry under his groping hands he knew, but the erect cock concealed beneath Sherlock's gown was as-yet unexplored territory – and the conjunction of the two sent a frisson of unspeakably pleasure down his spine._

Suddenly, the mercurial thing's sulkiness was gone, and he was all bright smiles and engaging looks, as if he'd decided to take Mycroft completely into his confidence – to give him his complete trust. "I can do it, brother!" he crowed. "I can fool them all, every one! The first time I tried it out, I only wanted to see if I could. Some of the things I bought, and some Vanessa and Marianne from the threepenny theater gave me. They helped me get the underthings right, too – though now I don't need any help, for I've grown quite good at putting myself together girl-fashion."

"Do you mean to tell me that you've been going about town dressed as a young woman by way of a lark?"

Sherlock cocked his head, considering. "Not entirely, I don't think. It's been interesting, trying to get it all right. Everything feels different in these clothes, Mycroft. Walking, and breathing, and everyone looks at me differently when I'm dressed like this, especially if I'm doing well at playing my part." He hesitated, biting at his pink-tinted lip, and then blurted out, "At any rate, I really don't see why it should be any different from my playing at being a chimney sweep or a pickpocket. I'd get in trouble in either case, were I found out. Why do you care so much more about this? You've never minded my disguises before. In fact, you've encouraged me to put into practice my observations of others."

Mycroft raised an interrogative eyebrow at his sibling. "Are you truly in doubt as to the difference of this scenario, Sherlock? You ought not to be; the situation ought to be more than clear to you. You are not such a child as that anymore."

"It's due to sex, then, that you object?" The boy's tone was scathing, sarcastic. He clearly regarded it as an extremely illegitimate reason.

Mycroft sighed, sitting down heavily on the edge of the neatly made bed and then looking at his little brother, who'd drawn his legs up under his skirts, clasping his knees tightly in an all-too-familiar gesture of upset and anxiety. This was not going at all in the way he'd intended – which, considering that it was Sherlock he was dealing with, was only to be expected.

"We've never really talked about sexuality, you and I," he said at last. "I suppose you know the biological facts, and I can see clearly enough that you've gained a thorough knowledge of the variant behaviors contained within human sexual dimorphism. Do you understand that not all sexual behavior is considered lawful, _petit frere_?"

Sherlock nodded, eyes wide, quiet and somehow solemn.

After a long moment, he softly confessed, "I am beginning to suspect, Elder Brother, that _I_ am not entirely lawful, not in that way."

Mycroft took in the sight of the wretched boy, looking strange and bright in his borrowed plumage, the fragility of the stilted slope of his narrow shoulders heightened by the trim of pale lace framing them. "No, Sherlock," he said, very gently. "I would not be at all surprised if you were not."

It was, after all, scarcely a shocking idea. Sherlock had always been odd, in every way that a child could be. There was no doubt in Mycroft's mind but that he would make an equally peculiar man, should he manage to survive that long. He'd been worried about this for a while now, holding his tongue until reason for speech became clear. It was clear enough now – clear enough that he had waited too long, in fact, to speak, and had left Sherlock to find his own way, and to find it crookedly and strangely.

_It took a moment to get Sherlock's clothes off, because he did not know how to lie back gracefully and let himself be undone. But then the outer gown was off, and Sherlock's corset laces were tracing patterns over his sharp shoulderblades and the narrow planes of his back and waist. His underthings were plain enough, serviceable rather than elegant, but somehow that only served to make them seem all the move lovely, encasing as they did his youthful pale body. He was so beautiful that Mycroft could scarcely breathe: brilliant and new and sharp as a blade, fair and open as a lily, at once innocent and unbearably erotic._

"My dear boy," he said, going to sit beside his little brother, "I will tell you that I have never believed there to be anything strictly wrong with these things, though they are against our English laws. They were not always so; many great wise men knew these forbidden passions, and knew them with the full permission of their own laws and worlds."

Sherlock peered up at him out of lightning-bright eyes.

Mycroft dropped his own away. "I merely mean for you to know, my dear boy, that I in no way censure you. We Holmes brothers are an odd lot; we must stick together in our various peculiarities. But what you have been doing is terribly unsafe, Sherlock, and I must absolutely insist that it stop. You are known in these parts as the son of Squire Holmes, and you are not such a commonly-featured boy as all that. Sooner or later you will be discovered, and then - !"

"So then what am I to do?" Sherlock asked plaintively. "I never have a moment to myself, and no one ever seems to understand things. Father is worst of all. This – going out in these disguises, I mean – has been stimulating. If I am not to be allowed to do anything real, and not be allowed to pretend myself someone else, even for the course of an afternoon, then _what am I to do?_ Sometimes I think I will run mad."

"You are to survive, _petit frere_ , and to endure as long as you must, in the promise that it will get better someday. You will not always be a child, Sherlock, and when you are a man grown you can decide the course of your own stars. I have no doubt but that you will do so; you are far too unconventional to live expectedly. But I will swear to you now that no matter what – no matter how you decide to live your adult life, I will always support and protect you to the best of my abilities. All I ask of you in return is that you keep as safe as you may."

Sherlock nodded his dark head, and Mycroft leaned in to affectionately pull the long false hair away, letting his brother's short black curls free and then ruffling them up with a steady hand. "You did it very well, you know," he told the lad. "A most impressive deception."

"Do you think so? I spent ever so long doing motion studies – not to mention the hours it took me to get the face paints right. I suppose real girls have someone about to teach them such things. Learned through experimentation, the process is quite exhausting!"

"You will be in disgrace with father this evening, you know."

"I know. Does he know that I escaped?"

"He hadn't discovered it when I left the house, and I think it unlikely he's been enlightened since. You ought to be all right on that score. For that remark about mother, you're still set to be payed out – but then you deserve that. You really must learn to mind your tongue, dear heart, or it will get you into very great trouble some day."

Sherlock gave him a crooked smile. "I'll try."

Mycroft had little enough hope of that. When occasion gave him reason to see clearly the extent of his little brother's tendencies toward self-destruction, anxiety for the child threatened almost to overwhelm him. Sherlock was so very bad at valuing himself above whatever momentary freak had engaged his quicksilver attention. But there was nothing else to be done, at present; lecture the boy and he'd just level a sarcastic eye at you and grow suddenly and mysteriously unable to hear a word you said. It was an impressive instance of mind over matter. Instead, he said only: "We will need to get home quickly if we are to remain undiscovered. I don't think you'll be able to get by Father in that rig; we'd best get you proper now, so as to avoid any greater scenes. Where are your things?"

"Marianne has them, back at the theater."

Mycroft sighed once more. "Then I suppose that I will have to go around and collect them. Does she know who you are? Will she give them to me, if I identify myself?"

"Yes, she knows me. She's been – a very great help, brother mine. Please don't be rude to her, or give her the cold shoulder. She's kept all my secrets, and been a good friend."

"I don't doubt it. I'll offer no insult to the lady, Sherlock, no matter as to her calling. But you, my boy, are to stay here – and to sit quietly until I return." He reached into his coat, and produced the thin volume of Plato's _Symposium_ he'd been carrying about in the appropriately-sized pocket. "Read this over, while you wait for me. You may find in it something to interest you."

_His little brother lay naked in his arms, quiet and contented and still. Mycroft had never seen him so still – always he was restless and filled with motion, body and mind. "Are you all right? Sherlock?" he whispered roughly against the scented neck._

"Mmm," Sherlock murmured wordlessly, and then roused himself to words. "Yes, I'm quite all right. And – I'm glad. That it was you, and not someone who was strange to me. I know what to do now, and I don't have to be worried."

"And you'll be able to wait, now, and be safe when I'm not by you? Don't risk yourself for pleasure, not when I'll care for you whenever you find yourself in need. Wait, and grow up – and even then, even when you're an adult, I hope that you never sacrifice your own safety for sexual experience. You are worth far too much, brother dear.

Leaving the dark room and stepping out once again into the gathering evening was like exiting a dream. The cooling air slapped at Myroft's face, and he hurried away from the high street down into the less reputable districts where more personal wares could be bought and sold. He'd never himself been the patron of a whorehouse, caring more for his privacy that he did for sexual congress, but the right places for such things were known to him well enough.

Mycroft Holmes was not such an optimisitc fool as to believe that all would be well with Sherlock; brotherly acceptance meant very little to fifteen-year-old boys. The child had acquiesced so quickly as to set his every suspicion running: he would try it again, with as little care for his own preservation as ever. It was simply the way he was made.

Very well, then. Mycroft would just have to see to that preservation himself. He had no intention of letting Sherlock languish in gaol for crimes against nature, nor to see him laid out and dissected or questioned and viciously examined as a pervert.

His mental perambulations coincided with unusually brisk physical motion, and he reached the threepenny opera sooner than might have been expected. Sherlock's Marianne was a young woman, not yet twenty-five, with a loose pile of pitch-black hair and a dusky roseate complexion. Her voice was low for a woman's, and rich. When he approached her and requested Sherlock's things, she gave him one long assessing look, and then nodded. "You'll be his brother, then? He said you were coming home for a spell."

Mycroft gave a silent, affirmative nod, feeling uncomfortably as if he'd somehow failed to measure up to her expectations. The beauty mark on her cheek was a real one, he noticed, and her accent was unexpectedly fine for a woman of her station.

"Keep an eye on that one," she said as she handed him the neat bundle of clothes, bound about with a dove-grey satin ribbon. "He's an odd little bird, but with a heart of great value."

"I've always kept both my eyes on him," Mycroft told her candidly, "but he moves too quickly for me to make out clearly."

"Then just love him as best you can," she said, and shut the door. He stood for a moment silently, watching the playbills for the night's entertainment going up, and then he trudged back up the street. He had a little brother to extricate from a tightly-laced corset.

*

Years later, when Sherlock took up with his sun-browned lath-thin ex-Army medic, Mycroft Holmes did not so much as bat an eyelash. He may, in point of fact, have smiled a very little bit to see his brother's heart settled at last, filled with the stillness that only contentment with one's self and one's companions can grant.

_He very carefully did not consider the lovely contrast of his brother's delicate body with the doctor's broader-built one, or imagine anew the color of Sherlock's mouth when it was painted red with the pressure and the friction of kisses._

He said nothing, of course.


End file.
